Domain Hosting: Your-Site.com & Terrible Customer Service

I host a handful of domains for various websites and email accounts that I maintain. My biggest account is adamnash.com, which I use to host a wide variety of email accounts that I use regularly.

For example, all of my eBay business goes through my email address, eBay-at-adamnash-dot-com.

I have hosted this domain, website & email accounts with the same company, Your-Site.com, since 2000. At the time, they were a very highly regarded Linux hosting shop, with low prices ($60/year), and great technical service for someone who could handle the technical details of FTP & shell access.

As of January 3rd I have read many hosting reviews,InMotion Hosting Reviews and FieldHost reviews changed the way I host my content, I have moved all of my accounts over to GoDaddy.com. Not only are they cheaper (less than $4 per month!), but they also offer great customer service (1 hour email response), more storage, more accounts, and more features.

As a warning to others, I’m putting this blog post up to tell you the simple truth: stay away from Your-Site.com. If you use them for hosting, switch to GoDaddy.com. If you don’t use Your-Site.com today, consider yourself lucky, and stay away.

The story of why is long, and I’m not sure I have the energy to post all of the absolutely infuriating emails from their customer service and sales staff. But let me give you the basics:

December 29th: All email accounts cease to receive email. I email their customer support asking when the accounts will be back online.

December 30th: Email accounts still don’t work. So much for the 99.9% uptime guarantee. I receive an email saying that they lost power in their ops center, and their backup system failed to re-establish their mail filers. They are working on fixing it as soon as possible. I respond, requesting their estimate of when email will be online. I start to worry about permanently losing important mail, or bounces to key accounts.

December 31st: Email accounts till don’t work. No response to my customer support email. No notice on the website that I can find. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

January 1st: Happy New Year! Email accounts still don’t work. No response to my customer support email. No notice on the website that I can find. I start thinking about whether I should move the domain to another provider.

January 2nd: Still no email accounts working. I finally receive an email from their customer support, and it’s a duplicate of the mail I received on December 30, but with an addendum that 40,000 email accounts were lost, and they are re-building them from backup. I respond asking for an estimated date for return. Second email response received (at least, it seems, they decided to work that day). It says, (paraphrased) Please do not email us asking about the loss of email (hah!), we are working as fast as we can. Sending email to customer support does not help.

At this point, I’ve had it. I go over to GoDaddy.com which is my domain registrar. For less than $4/month, they give me:

5GB storage

500 free email accounts (10MB storage)

5 premium email accounts (25MB storage)

250GB bandwidth

10 MySQL databases

No ads

An incredible host of features, including photo hosting, blogging, etc.

Not only that, but when I ask their customer support a question by email (they have 24/7 phone support), they promise an answer in one hour. And it’s true.

Just to finish the story:

January 3rd: I’m all set up with GoDaddy.com, email is flowing actually before end of day on January 2nd. I contact Your-Site.com, and ask them to ZIP up my existing mail folders, and to close the account. They respond by requiring me to fill out a form on their site. I fill out the form, and they close the accounts. When I ask for the mail folders, they rudely reply that I should have requested that before they deleted the account, since they are now deleted. When I provide them the email with the original request, instead of apologizing, they repeat that the mailboxes are now deleted, and that in the future I should make the request before cancelling the account.

The best part, of course, is the footer of their customer support emails which says,

Please tell your friends and business associates about us. Should you refer a new customer to us, we’ll credit your account for one free month!

I think this story is a good lesson in terrible customer service. I was a long time customer of your-site.com, using them for six years. I knew there were better deals out there, but what I had was working, and I was happy to be their customer. I could have easily been their customer for six more years.

If they had just shown any sort of remorse – an apology for the trouble – this might have turned into a story about great customer service. People underestimate how valuable a simple apology can be to rectify even a very bad situation. I was expecting a proactive email that said:

“We’re sorry, but the recent storms have brought down our email service. We may be down for days. We apologize for this interruption, and we know how important our services are to you. We are working as fast as we can to bring your accounts online, and we will be providing you with the next 3 months of service free of charge.”

But that’s not what happened, and now I am not only no longer a customer of your-site.com, I’ve also become an advocate against them.

In honor of GoDaddy.com‘s excellent product & service, I’m going to honor them with a badge on my right-hand column for at least the next 4 weeks. If you need a cheap domain, email address, and website, they are awesome. I just gave my wife her own personalized domain & email address for fun, all for less than $40 per year. They even have an account with 100GB of storage for $6.29/month that might be very interesting for sharing full-size photos with my family.

I had a similar problem with p4host.com and others whose names I can’t remember. They always make things sound like it the customers fault. I’ve been using domain hosting on the net for over 8 years and I like to think by now, I know what I am doing. Right now, I use hostgator but I did consider Godaddy since they are my registrar of choice. If I need another host in the future, they will probably get my business and I’ll tell them you sent me! 😉

This was a terrific warning which I unfortunately did not see in time. Over the past few weeks I got loads of bounced email from my domain name hosted at your-site.com – I began to wonder whether someone was using my email address to send loads of spam.

Suddenly, as of last night I received errors that my emails couldn’t download from the domain name hosted at your-site.com and thought well, maybe I didn’t see the request for payment and my credit card has expired.

Well surprise surprise, my domain name is not only not online, your-site.com is also not online. When I checked out their Whois information, your-site doesn’t expire until 24th June 2009 but their site is absolutely down and inactive! http://www.whois.ws/whois-com/ip-address/your-site.com/

This kind of service is absolutely awful, no warning and it seems that I have lost my hosting (and fees paid) completely. I will now have to transfer the site to another host. I won’t even bother to chase down your-site about this as I would have already transferred my site to another host and won’t be needing their services again.

I have just googled ‘www.your-site.com’ because I was trying to watch several videos on YouTube and found that the video screens were blocked by a fake popup from the website the rendered the video unwatchable! And you could not get rid of the fake popup. That’s reason enough FOR ME to spread the word about how awful they are.